65 books like A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans

Nobel-prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee is not known for dodging big questions and moral gravitas, and my pick here is no exception.

The Lives of Animals would seem to be the logical choice (and with it, the novel that eventually emerged from it, Elizabeth Costello of 2003). But I’m going with his earlier novel, Disgrace (published the same year as Lives, 1999), because I think it’s the stronger book, and by that I mean more unsettling, more challenging.

Disgrace captures how the most intense and meaningful episodes in our moral lives can nevertheless be opaque and, in a sense, unfathomable. And few books demonstrate in a “show don’t tell” way just how intertwined race, sexuality, and animality are in our moral drama.

I love how Hearne—a poet, student of philosophy, essayist, and master trainer of dogs and horses—weaves together her hands-on experience working with animals and reflections on the (often uninformed) philosophical commonplaces about them: insights that could only come from someone with her unique skill set.

As the title implies, Hearne is keenly interested in the relationship between language, the mental and emotional worlds of humans and animals, and the challenges of doing justice to how those worlds do (and do not) overlap. (One essay is called “How To Say `Fetch!’”)

No one writes more insightfully—and sometimes iconoclastically—about complex concepts such as animal dignity, honor, and humor, and no one captures more beautifully how animals are unique individuals, each with its own personality.

The philosopher who invented deconstruction sets out—in a philosophical tour de force—to dismantle the grounds on which Western philosophy (and the Abrahamic religions) attempt to maintain the absolute difference in kind between the human and the animal.

Derrida’s point, I want to emphasize, is not that humans and animals are “the same,” but rather that the distinction between “the human” and “the animal” is of no use in trying to understand the wild diversity of life forms on earth and the ways in which they are entwined. At stake here too is our (often disavowed) relationship to our own animality.

An academic and scholarly read? Yes. But one that also takes very seriously what Derrida sometimes calls the animal “genocide” currently taking place underneath “normal” everyday life in developments such as mass extinction and factory farming.

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is usually taken to be the founding philosophical text for the animal rights movement, but I think Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights presents the more compelling, more multi-dimensional argument.

Where Singer grounds moral standing in the fundamental interest in avoiding suffering, Regan foregrounds the “inherent value” of being the “experiencing subject of a life,” for whom avoiding suffering is only part of the question.

There’s plenty of disagreement about whether the rights framework is the best way to think about our moral duties to animals (cf. Derrida above). And Regan’s position is available in less rigorous and scholarly form in some of his other books. But for the full walk-through of the best argument for animal rights, this is the text.

This is another amazing nonfiction book by ecologist and New York Times bestselling author Carl Safina.

With his usual exquisite prose, the author delves deep into the lives and feelings of other beings, from elephants to dolphins. And once again, Safina does an outstanding job in uncovering the secrets of the natural world that surrounds us using many of his personal experiences in the wild and his wonderful ability to tell stories to the general public.

In an easy, breezy style, Barash introduces you to sociobiology, the most mind-blowing perceptual lens since Charles Darwin’s 1857 introduction of evolution. Like Hawkins and Thomas, Barash reveals everything from the operation of genes to the culture of the Inuit in the impossible wastes of the arctic.  And he shows you, once again, how the findings of widely separated sciences fit into a spectacular big picture.

This is the best single book summarizing contemporary scientific knowledge on what makes humans different from other animals. It strikes a middle path between “romantics” who want to believe dolphins and primates can do everything we can and “killjoys” who try to maintain more traditional notions of human superiority.

But if there is a “gap” between us and other animals, exactly what is it? Suddendorf tracks the question from one field of possible answers to the next, from linguistics to anthropology to archaeology to primatology to cognitive science.

The book reads like a detective story – I couldn’t put it down.

If you’re interested in the workings of the human imagination you have to start in our deep evolutionary past, and Metazoa does just this.

Godfrey Smith is an eminent philosopher of science, and brings his considerable experience under the ocean to understanding how the minds of shrimps, octopi, and fish probably conceive of the world.

With stunning evocations of the undersea world and his intimate encounters with these fascinating creatures, the author of Other Minds brings a battery of modern zoological and biological expertise to bear on revealing just how cognitively complex these supposedly simple creatures are. You’ll never look at them the same again.

Macaque monkeys are machiavellian, get it? This is a proper academic survery of macaque social behavior in the wild. I was amazed to learn that social climbing behaviors is not just a chimp thing, and not just a male thing. Female monkeys are shameless social climbers, and this promotes the survival of their genes just like biologists tell us. Monkeys cooperate as well as compete, but they calculate when to cooperate and with whom. In short, they cooperate when it promotes their genes. When the calculating behavior of humans gets you down, it’s helpful to know how monkeys do the same thing. A similar book on a different species is Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, by Cheney and Seyfarth. Yet another is The Lemurs' Legacy: The Evolution of Power, Sex, and Love. I studied one primate after another and kept seeing the same basic patterns,… show more.

Cooke’s hilarious, spot-on exploration of how we humans create our understandings of female nature and capabilities may seem an odd starting point, but bear with me.

Cooke exposes how scientists and scholars for centuries have mis-reported and normalized views about males and females that have little to do with actual science and much to do with the gendered attitudes of the scientists. We all have presumptions about gender roles we don’t question.

But to explore the intersections of gender and faith we need to become aware of our pre-conceptions and how we got them. From Dick the sage grouse to elder female leadership within orca pods, you’ll be laughing while gob-smacked at the shaky biological foundation of many of our gender presumptions about what is “natural” for males and females.